The Importance of Buying your own Stock Images
There are many different ways to make use of stock photos. In some instances, you might not need to buy the exclusive rights to a stock photo. But there are also times when the premium stock images you use should be bought and paid for and the exclusive rights gained.
If you’re looking to make that photo yours and ensure that no one else uses it, you need to understand the importance of buying stock images. Simply using a basic license that doesn’t offer any kind of exclusivity will probably leave you disappointed later on. And those photos might not offer you what you need.
We’re going to talk about all of that and more today. So if you want to find out more about the importance of buying your own stock images, you’re in the right place.
Buying Exclusive Rights to Stock Images
There are many reasons why you might want to purchase a stock image with exclusive rights. And the importance of buying stock images is best demonstrated by the licensing agreement that comes with it. These will outline precisely what you can do and what you can’t do with a stock image once you’ve paid for it, and if you choose to go with a stock image without exclusive rights, you’ll be much more limited.
Buying an image and ensuring you’re the only one able to use it puts you in a much stronger position and gives you so many more options than you would ordinarily have if you chose to pay for an image with a lesser license. It’s vital not to assume that all stock image licenses are the same because they’re very much not.
Ensure Competitors and Imitators Can’t Use Your Images
If you’re buying a stock image to be used for commercial purposes, it’s usually a good idea to make sure that you have exclusive rights to the use of the image. If you don’t, there’s always going to be a chance that the image is picked up by someone else and they’ll then be able to use it as well, and by then there will be nothing you can do about that.
The last thing you want when using an image for commercial purposes is to have your competitors using it. Perhaps even more dangerous is having imitators using your image and pretending to be your company online. That’s something that can always happen, but if they buy the same image as you and have the same rights to its use, you won’t even be able to stop them.
Ideal for Serious Authors and Publishers
If you’re a serious author or a publisher, you’ll know precisely how important artwork is. People can decide to read or not to read a book based on what they see on the cover. You can research how to buy stock images for a book cover all you want, but if you don’t have exclusive rights to the image you choose, no matter how perfect it is, you’ll always be taking a huge risk.
After all, you want your work to stand out and stand on its own. If people see your image as a generic one that’s used in lots of other places by lots of other creators or businesses, they’ll have far less interest in purchasing it. That’s why it makes sense to ensure you buy your own stock images that you have exclusive rights to use if you’re an author or publisher.
Cheaper Than Creating Your Own Original Images
Another major benefit that comes with buying images that you have exclusive rights to use is that it’s a lot cheaper than creating your own images. That’s always the case for premium stock images, and the only other way of accessing images that are exclusively yours to use is to make them yourself or hire someone else to make originals for you.
The costs associated with hiring photographers, models, make-up artists and lighting professionals is very high. Unfortunately, there’s simply no way that the bespoke creation route can ever be more affordable than buying the exclusive rights to the use of a stock image. So if you want to do this affordably, it definitely makes sense to choose stock images.
Ensure the Image is Always Associated with You/Your Product
When people see your work or your product, they want to associate it with you right away. That’s what happens when you have exclusive rights to the use of an image. And it’s why when you’re looking at how to buy stock images for a book cover, you should always make sure that you’re choosing an option that comes with a license that grants exclusive rights to you as the buyer.
You don’t want people to see your image and then see it somewhere else. This makes it look less professional and it means that those images won’t be cemented in people’s minds as being associated with you or associated with a particular product of yours that you’re trying to sell.
An Investment That’s Often Worth Making
We’ve already mentioned how not all stock image licenses are the same, and that’s certainly true. It’s also worth mentioning that buying an image and having exclusive rights to that image is more expensive than buying a stock image that comes with more limited usage rights. There’s no getting away from that fact.
However, paying for exclusive usage rights is an investment that might just be worth making. If you want to gain access to the kinds of benefits we’ve discussed above, you certainly need to buy your own stock images and ensure no one else is able to use them. It’s an investment that pays off for many people and for many businesses that choose this path.